Bush has another Brownie

[overthebow]

How fucked up are these people anyway?

From http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...1oct01,0,3602588.story?coll=la-home-headlines

HE NATION
Shades of FEMA's Brown in Bush Pick
By Ken Silverstein, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Less than a month after the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped down amid accusations of cronyism and incompetence, the Bush administration is being assailed for nominating another political ally to head a key agency for responding to foreign disasters.

One leading international relief group is publicly opposing the appointment of Ellen Sauerbrey to the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, and others have expressed private concerns over her lack of experience in emergency response work.

Sauerbrey, a former member of the Republican National Committee who was Bush's Maryland state campaign chairwoman in 2000, is the U.S. representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

If confirmed by the Senate, which has not set a date for a hearing, Sauerbrey would head an agency with a $700-million annual budget that has responsibility for coordinating the U.S. government's response to refugee crises during natural disasters and wars.

The bureau coordinates with private and international organizations, such as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, to help set up refugee camps and to ensure sufficient food and other aid. It has helped confront refugee crises around the globe, including in war-torn Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in southern Asia after the December tsunami.

Although appointing political allies to government jobs is a tradition in Washington, the refugee bureau is a complex agency with a broad portfolio. Past administrations, Republican and Democratic, have generally turned to someone with technical expertise to head it.

Sauerbrey, 68, was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1978. She has been a conservative activist for decades but has no direct experience mobilizing responses to humanitarian emergencies.

 

[TWB]

But she's loyal, and that's all that counts.

 

[Matthew Craig]

When will you people tire of complaining about politics!!??!!

 

[Lavared]

When will you people tire of complaining about politics!!??!!

My guess is never.

 

[dolf]

When will you people tire of complaining about politics!!??!!

when will you tire of complaining of people complaining about politics!!??!!

 

[ruminator]

Here's a link to a article on the many brownies currently serving. There are some alarmingly unqualified people in positions of responsibility

A TIME inquiry finds that at top positions in some vital government agencies, the Bush Administration is putting connections before experience


In presidential politics, the victor always gets the spoils, and chief among them is the vast warren of offices that make up the federal bureaucracy. Historically, the U.S. public has never paid much attention to the people the President chooses to sit behind those thousands of desks. A benign cronyism is more or less presumed, with old friends and big donors getting comfortable positions and impressive titles, and with few real consequences for the nation.

But then came Michael Brown. When President Bush's former point man on disasters was discovered to have more expertise about the rules of Arabian horse competition than about the management of a catastrophe, it was a reminder that the competence of government officials who are not household names can have a life or death impact. The Brown debacle has raised pointed questions about whether political connections, not qualifications, have helped an unusually high number of Bush appointees land vitally important jobs in the Federal Government.

The Bush Administration didn't invent cronyism; John F. Kennedy turned the Justice Department over to his brother, while Bill Clinton gave his most ambitious domestic policy initiative to his wife. Jimmy Carter made his old friend Bert Lance his budget director, only to see him hauled in front of the Senate to answer questions on his past banking practices in Georgia, and George H.W. Bush deposited so many friends at the Commerce Department that the agency was known internally as "Bush Gardens." The difference is that this Bush Administration had a plan from day one for remaking the bureaucracy, and has done so with greater success.

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1109345,00.html

I'm trying to quit, MC....I have to go slow to avoid withdrawls.

 

[overthebow]

When it comes to brownies, I think the country would be safer if bush went back to these

http://www.chantilly.com/cookies_s/chocolate_chip_brownie.jpg